Richard C. Longworth, senior fellow at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, contributes his knowledge and ideas about issues that affect the Midwest.

Random Musings

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The world, and the Midwestern part of it, are on their own for the next three weeks. The Midwesterner is taking a mid-summer break, and will be back in mid-July. We leave town with a wish that sunny skies and balmy breezes soothe these days for all of you.

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

It’s no news that the American news business is in flux and in trouble. The powerful newspapers and giant networks that dominated journalism in the last half of the 20th century have fragmented into shards of new media, blogs, social media, and websites seemingly tailored for every possible taste.

The journalistic past is all but dead, but the future is barely glimpsed. Technology drives this transformation, and the technology itself evolves daily. What’s left are two huge questions:

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Once upon a recent time, most of what we read appeared in our local newspapers, or maybe the Time magazine we bought at the corner drugstore. Now the web delivers a daily blizzard of articles, op-eds, blogs, think pieces, and other journalism. One blog leads to another. Friends send email with interesting links. Every day, I read something new and think, “Gee, everybody should read this.”

So, in lieu of a blog this week, here’s a reading list of recent items that caught my eye. Most deal with the economy, or jobs, or globalization. Some are Midwestern, others national. Each deserves a few minutes of your time.

(And if you've got some suggestions of your own, please let us hear about them.)

John McCarron, Chicago Tribune, on Wandering CorporationsJohn McCarron, the Chicago journalist and teacher, writes on The Great Vamoose of so-called American corporations, like Walgreen's, exploring moves to overseas tax havens to save their shareholders a few bucks, and never mind the damage to the country where they were born and grew.

William Galston, The Wall Street Journal, on Jobs for Young People William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on what this economy is doing to young people who just want a good job, and why so many educated young adults have fetched up as baristas.

Two Pieces on the Middle ClassOnce the US had the world’s largest middle class. We even had the world wealthiest poor people. No longer. A New York Times article reported the news, and Thomas Edsall, one of our best economics journalists, gives one reason why.

Harold Meyerson and Thomas Edsall on Liberal CitiesAmerican Prospect magazine has a piece by its editor-at-large, Harold Meyerson, on how liberal mayors in some cities—not only New York City but Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Boston—are following new policies to close the income and wealth gaps between the classes in their towns. It’s an intriguing idea but Edsall, once again, has his doubts.

Brookings on Technology and Cities One new wrinkle is the use of technology and big data to deal with the problems of cities. Brookings did a seminar on this and came up with some thoughts.

The Economist and Bloomberg on Technology and JobsSome other articles look at the impact of technology on our standard of living with a more skeptical eye. These include The Economist magazine, usually a drum-beater for open markets and technology, and Bloomberghere and here.

Chicago Tribune on the Image of CitiesWhen it comes to polishing an image and drawing in foreign investment, some unlikely places could teach Midwestern cities, such as Chicago, a thing or so. So says Alex Rodriguez in the Chicago Tribune, after a visit to Bogota.

The Buzz About PikettyHave you read Capital in the 21st Century, that Thomas Piketty book yet? If not, you’ll have to wait a while. Harvard Press, to its delighted amazement, has a blockbuster on its hands, and is scurrying around to print more copies—a lot more copies—than it had planned. In the meantime, Amazon says it’s out of stock and my local Barnes and Noble says it won’t have any copies for at least a week. In the meantime, there have been some rapturous reviews: a review by Branko Milanovic at the World Bank. Or by the excellent John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Or Paul Krugman’s review from The New York Review of Books.

There will be dissidents a-plenty on this, mostly the classical economists whom Piketty scorns, but most of them have yet to chime in. Tyler Cowan is one of the first, but even he admits that Piketty’s book is a landmark event.

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

There’s a theory, held by some American pundits, that Vladimir Putin’s menacing of Ukraine is all our fault.

Here’s the argument: In the 1990s, Moscow had just lost the Cold War. The Soviet Union had broken up. The Warsaw Pact was dead. Russia was down and all but out. Instead of being gracious winners, the West gloated. We brought Poland and most of Moscow’s other allies into NATO. We expanded the alliance eastward all the way to the former Soviet border. By rubbing it in, we guaranteed that, sooner or later, we’d get a future nationalistic Russian leader—Putin, for instance—bent on avenging this humiliation by hitting us where he could—Ukraine, for instance.

According to this theory, if we’d just treated Russia more like an equal and foregone NATO expansion, Putin would be running a proper parliamentary democracy and diplomatic harmony would rule from the Azores to Vladivostok.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

We’ve been here before, we and the Russians. We’ve stood eyeball to eyeball, playing double-dare in international politics, mostly in Eastern Europe, plotting just how far we can push the other guy before he pushes back.

Back then we called it the Cold War. We didn’t think the possibility of another Cold War would loom quite so quickly, but it has.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

A big sporting event grabs the global spotlight and turns it on the city or country where it is held. With the Sochi Winter Olympics barely two weeks away, that spotlight will shine on Russia, for better or worse. So it’s a good time to talk about that tragic and complicated nation and ask a question that baffles most Americans:

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

In this season of noisy discord, when Midwestern states and cities compete for bad jobs and large young men concuss each other on Saturdays for our amusement, it’s good to be reminded that our region still harbors poets who speak to our better natures and to more homely verities.

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

More than any other country, the United States looks to philanthropists and their giving to fill the gaps – cultural, social, civic, educational – left unattended by either the market or the government. Over the years, this giving by both corporations and family became an economic force, especially in the Midwest. But more recently, much corporate giving is looking like guilt money paid by companies trying to make up for the social damage caused by their day-to-day activities.

At a time when the market is staggering and government is cutting back, philanthropy looms even larger in American life, and deserves a closer look.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

The epidemic of inner city murders in Chicago is well known. Less well known is the spread of heroin and other drugs to the rural counties of the Midwest. The link between these two pathologies is virtually unknown, but is crucial to an understanding of the Midwestern battlefield in the drug wars.

Oddly, the battlefield is getting more bloody partly because of social and police policies that can be seen as successes in themselves. These include the demolition of Chicago’s huge public housing projects, the flow of Mexican immigrants to Chicago, the city’s role as the nation’s transport hub, police successes in breaking up huge urban gangs, the spread of affordable housing in small towns, and state laws that have helped squelch local labs making methamphetamine, or meth.

Thursday, September 05, 2013

The Sunday New York Times these days seems to be edited by the descendants of Saul Steinberg, the New Yorker cartoonist who drew the famous Gotham-centric map of the United States. Steinberg’s map showed nothing much between the Hudson River and the Pacific except Las Vegas and a couple of mountains, and was intended as a parody of a parochial New Yorker’s view of the nation.

Day in and day out, the daily Times does a first-rate job of covering the U.S. Certainly, the Times’ Chicago bureau, led by Monica Davey, does a better job of covering the Midwest than any other paper, including Midwestern newspapers themselves.

But the Sunday Times, edited separately, regularly forgets that there’s a real nation out there west of Jersey City, filled with Times’ readers who often wonder whether those folks in Times Square think Steinberg was serious.

The Global Midwest Initiative of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is a regional effort to promote interstate dialogue and to serve as a resource for those interested in the Midwest's ability to navigate today's global landscape.